An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, December 19, 2025
John Adams Griefen (b. Worcester, MA, 1942; d. Bergerac, France 2025) was an American artist and early Color Field painter who made important contributions to abstract art in the United States and in Europe. In his successful career as a painter he had seventeen solo exhibitions in New York City, the first at age 27. Foremost, Griefen is known for the essence of color in his paintings, and for many years, he made large, often monumental, acrylic paintings on canvas.
Contributed by Amanda Church / Marina Adams has long been exploring the range of allusions that can be conjured by various color combinations and the scale and placement of simple shapes, which press up and vibrate against each other in subtle, sexy ways. Curvy configurations, interspersed with diamonds and triangles, hint at myriad aspects of nature and the female form. In Adams’ current show “Cosmic Repair” at Timothy Taylor, variations on this trajectory continue in nine paintings, all new and acrylic on linen except Singing to the Highest Deity from 2020 hanging by itself in the back room. Influences range from Matisse to, according to the press release, “Uzbek textiles, Indigenous American Southwest pottery, and the Great Pyramids.”
Contributed by Lucas Moran / On Instagram, where most artists list their websites, exhibitions, and accomplishments beneath their handles, Dan Schein keeps it simple: “artist/painter,” followed by “Person Who Stutters.” It’s fitting for a painter whose work, some now on display at JJ Murphy Gallery, feels as though it may sometimes have a tough time coming out of him. But Schein, a painter’s painter, knows how to elicit beauty from struggle….
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / While there have always been easily discreditable philistines who dismiss abstract art as a fraud, many leaders in today’s art world marginalize it for other reasons. They see it as anachronistic, irrelevant, boring, or, most unforgivably of all, shackled to its white European origins. It’s not far-fetched to think that th
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / “Let the Painting Make You,” the exhibition of Brice Marden’s last paintings; at Gagosian Gallery, set me to thinking about the relationship between Marden’s earlier gestural works and Gerhardt Richter’s process-oriented abstract paintings, which in turn led me to consider the connection of their works to those of David Reed and then to the French artists Simon Hantai and Bernard Frize who, like Reed, creates the illusion of an impossible spontaneity. Slowly, I came to focus on the question of why Richter is identified with post-modernism, while Marden and Reed’s works are most often critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist. While Hantai (the modernist?) and Frieze (the post-modernist?) fit the question of what constitutes post-modern abstract painting, their references and histories are different for consideration here. Instead, I decided I would focus on Richter, Reed and Marden all who seem to transgress the formalist and modernist dictums that were generated in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and then exported abroad, as such Hantai and Frize are part of another genealogy.
